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For sure. There are a plethora of journals catering to specific needs and their formats (and content) are reflective of it. One important element of it is is that original papers are often a discussion platform, where evidence for competing hypotheses are presented and discussed.

Publishers do not change the text, but they might e.g. highlight typos and such. Some also make suggestions, but the authors control the text fully (they have to, as they are the subject experts). Some journals have page limits or page limits for certain types of articles, others simply charge more if the article is too long, especially as digital publishing becomes more common.

Conversely, sometimes drugs are administered in a less active form (prodrugs) and are then metabolized into the active form. Beside oxidation there also many other metabolization pathways (codeine is demethylated to the more bioactive morphine, for example, but most glucuronidated, IIRC).

Obviously, though there are some folks who think that drugs somehow safer or less harmful than, say, vaccines. Yes, and I think that there are some animal studies that suggested that thinning of the blood might play a role in improving blood flow and might improve healing (and potentially more than offset the disruption of inflammatory signaling). As you said, things are complicated. As well as other potentially unrecognized parameters that can interact with the drug in question. Sometimes in ways that we do not really understand. For example, Aspirin has been identified as a risk factor for Reye's syndrome (mostly, but not exclusively in kids), typically in conjunction with viral infections.

I agree that side effects are a bit of misnomer. As I mentioned, any drug has a plethora of effects (though not necessarily symptoms) and it is basically convention to label effects that are not the intended purpose as side effect. Hope you are feeling better soon. With regard to broken bones, aspirin is anti-inflammatory and can help somewhat against inflammation-related pains (though it should do less against pain signals from the fracture itself, I would think). But on the downside, inflammation is apart of a signaling cascade related to healing processes. Based on that, there is the hypothesis that using too much aspirin could delay bone healing. But OTOH I think I saw a more systematic study on operation of some sort of fracture and no delayed healing was observed there (but I also don't recall what the age of the cohort was, as that would also play an outsized role). Another related thought I forgot to add to my earlier post: for treatment, the medication ideally only targets the affected tissue/region. However, in most cases there is no way to achieve that relying instead on flooding the body with the medication in sufficiently high dosages so that the target region gets enough of the medication. That also means that non-target areas will be exposed to the drug and also affecting healthy tissue. Drugs are, generally speaking, not precision instruments.

What do you mean? There are tons of books on writing research papers. There are general books on the craft of paper writing and specialized ones for each discipline.

Unfortunately, we already had those years. And a couple before that (if perhaps a bit less blatant). I think, at this point folks are swimming in coffee but not noticing anything.

It is because of biology. Even if a compounds specifically targets, say, a receptor and nothing else, inhibiting/blocking that receptor can have many effects. Some of these effects are beneficial in dealing with a disease, others may not. Think about it that way: even in a single cell, the functions of molecules are interconnected. If you inhibit one enzymatic function, it has impact on many levels as up and down-stream pathways can be affected. Now increase the complexity from single cell to tissue, organ and organism and you have a host of non-target functions that will be impacted. Even if you eat things, you have a host of effect on your body, even if you do not think of it as medication. Actually antibiotics are frequently disagreeable as they also interact with eukaryotic cells. Just not as fatally as with prokaryotic ones. Fluoroquinolone antibiotics for example can also interact with GABA-A receptors, for example. But as I said, even if they manage to find a highly specific ligand, the interaction itself can kick off a plethora of other unintended effects. The key for good medication is that it has a net benefit to the patient. It is exceedingly rare that some drug will have only one effect, even if you do not feel any symptoms. However, as long as there is a dosage where the primary issue is alleviated and the side effects are manageable it is a net benefit. But I don't think that we should think of drugs as highly specific agent that targets the source of a disease specifically. Rather, it is something that interacts with our biology on multiple level and hopefully during that course the issue is alleviated. That, of course depends on the mechanism and complexity of the disease to be treated, of course.

Fictional characters are not alive. Unfortunately that is what folks believe, contrary to all evidence but also simple logic (i.e., differences in outcomes, priorities, goals, mechanisms, procedures etc.).

Define "small". I think it is more accurate to say that it is written for experts and not the general public. No amount of random notes will change that. In fact, it will only confuse folks more as you need knowledge of specific laboratory/group conventions to make sense out of notes. We often use shorthand that is not used much outside of our lab for example. Again, that "supporting" information won't help you. Look, the bottom line is that to papers are for advanced audiences and the only way to understand them fully is to gain at least some level of expertise. There is no simple or convenient way to convey expert level knowledge to a layperson without losing information. If that was possible, we wouldn't need higher education in the first place. Look, this is an entirely different discussion and it goes exactly against your point of broader audiences. The folks interested in why certain approaches are a specialized sub-section of an already specialized sub-section. And in 90% of the cases in the wet lab it is because someone messed up during pipetting, or got distracted during the process. Again, if we added each failure as supplementary information you could have a ten-page article with 800 pages of supplements. Add to that discarded raw data you would need a few gigs of downloads for each simple thing. Now, I will say that there are some journals who try to publish negative outcomes and I do think that there is some value in that. But again, these would be well-vetted experiments and not just a bunch of random outcomes. I have no idea how your thought on AI ties into any of this, though. It is not like that the AI can make sense of these things easier. I suspect you would change your mind if you have actually seen how records are done in the lab.

I think you have no idea how many notes are generated in the course of a writing a paper and how much is not included because it would make the whole thing unreadable. There is a bigger point in putting somehow preserving even failed experiments into a repository to ensure academic integrity. But again, considering how much work really is just random thoughts and failed experiments (most of the time due to inexperience) it would be take a huge amount of time to create a dump that no one ever looks into. Folks look at Einstein's note because he is famous and folks are curious about him, not because it is necessary to understand the science. What I take away form the average student lab book is that they really need to learn to read and write better. Not everything is information and a key element of science is to condense meaningful information. If you want fluff to distract you from information, you got the internet.

As a former D&D player, I do not really see the issue here.

I don't understand that. I am not that familiar with math papers, but I would assume that any paper with a proof would report on it in a way that can be followed. Why would you put anything in the margins? if it is relevant it should be in the paper. I have no idea why the comparison with high school is supposed to do.

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That has been the trend for a while. I think the one born around 2000 are roughly at the brink where you still can find folks who area able to at least learn what is needed, even if it seems harder to mentor than the generations before. But looking at the current freshmen crop which is roughly just 5 years later, there is a noticeable drop. I think a part of it is just accelerated by the pandemic. But what I hear from current high-school teachers, the generation after that is going to be a doozy. Reading is a big issue, as so many other skills are connected to it. But it seems that school boards have been pressuring teachers to drop deadlines for assignments and other things that are considered to be affecting student's mental health. And this is translated into university and those kids will break during actual work.

Papers have a different purpose than wiki articles. The latter are oftentimes superficial summaries, which, in the best case also include some synthesis from multiple sources. For many articles this is not the case, however. The structure of a paper allows someone within the field to evaluate the hypotheses, assess the quality of the approach and possible weaknesses (methods section), the quality of the quality to support their hypotheses (results section). Discussions and introduction not only provide overall context, but also tells the readers where the researchers are coming from, and allow experts also to evaluate overall conceptual weaknesses and strengths. A paper is essentially a discussion tool for scientists. Changing that to a wiki article would defeat its overall purpose. I think you are not missing out much if you do not understand papers, it just means that you likely lack the necessary training to get the information out of them. After all it is a specialized tool, which is quite the opposite to an encyclopedia like wiki, where accessibility is more important than depth of information. That is a horrible idea. A paper is a cleaned up synthesis of often a lot of work. Looking at the raw version of it, would be entirely incomprehensible to except for the person generating int. I have to keep telling my students to clean up their notes as often I barely understand what they mean and over time, they will also forget what their notes mean. Research is almost never linear and 80-90% of the material never makes it into a paper for good reasons. This again is the opposite of what science is about. Science is about the synthesis of outcomes not just a bunch of data aggregates. I am repeating myself, a bit, but I think the desire to simplify the data processing process due to easy digestible (if useless) information on the internet has degraded the abilities of younger students to read and comprehend data. Folks are still capable of repeating snippets information, but the ability to comprehend and synthesize has definitely taken a nosedive over the last decade. This is also correlated with the inability (or unwillingness) of students to read longer texts. Textbooks are rarely read anymore, for example. Simplifying data presentation in sciences will IMO further contribute to that decline.

The downside is that it is going to be hard for folks who want to learn which are actually accurate and convey information and which are mostly entertainment with some facts or factoids thrown in. Generally, folks are more in favour of simply stories as they require less work to understand. But that also means that folks never learn to learn more complicated concepts. This is somewhat evidenced by the fact that in university, despite these diverse sources of information, the level of understanding of concepts has dropped. I.e. not needing to exercise those thinking muscles because of convenient media access could be a net detriment.

I think expertise in the various civil services is an interesting point- it is somewhat independent of the democratic process as those folks are generally not elected, but competence can be a big factor in the success of these institutions. That being said, they are a vulnerable to what I call an administrative mindset, where the administrative process takes precedence over the actual mission. And oftentimes elected folks further undermine it by hiring folks that are ideologically aligned, which can contrast with the mission of the service. Trump is a current example, but clearly not the only one. Intelligence and compassion is very intangible not a great criterion and arguably running for office and being in office requires more people skills than anything else. In the end, you are not working at the problems themselves, you are a decision-maker and if you are good in your job, you have assembled of team that bring all the right qualifications.

Neither satires nor parodies need to be funny- they tend to be extrapolations and exaggerations that could have an comedic effect, but don't have. 1984 is clearly a satire on totalitarianism. It follows a tradition satire where fictional exaggeration is applied to critique current societal situations. That being said, some parts of the books are potentially meant to be humorous, though they are written so realistically that it might not appear as such. For example, one could argue that the part where folks were confronted with a switch with whom they have always been at war with and the ensuing bewilderment how their banners were all changed by traitors could be seem humorous. However, especially in the light of current developments, it might just feel too realistic to be funny.

Especially as global capitalism has been around and while I don't have data at hand, in my memory unhinged conspiracy theorists didn't have such an easy time grabbing power (like in Romania, and arguably USA right now). At least superficially, that element looks more akin to what happened before global capitalism on that scale was a thing. Also interesting with respect to media literacy: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adl2829

That, however, has been always an issue with democracies. Some are seeing a repetition of the crumbling of young democracies in the 1930s. However, the argument there was that many countries lacked experience and/or safeguards to protect against anti-democratic actions. Now, it seems to me that the gains were effectively wiped away, and I don't see a real consensus on how it happened.

I am fairly confident that at the University level it is too late. First, college kids are only one small-ish segment of the segment. But even worse, one has to work against all the bullshit that is in their heads and their distrust is also increasingly directed against any form of expertise. Weird assumption regarding topics such as vaccinations and evolution have become increasingly prevalent (anti-evolution sentiments were higher 20 years ago, but dropped only to increase in recent times again). In some counties media literacy is being introduced into school curricula. The issue is that they somewhat still assume that there is a "normal" media landscape running parallel to the internet. However, traditional media are being dismantled and independent news are becoming a rarity. Well or there is no pendulum anymore. Well, that is symptomatic of the overall problem. Folks want to have competing things. They want the threat of climate change to go away. Simultaneously, they want to carry the burden of the cost for that. Similarly during the pandemic. Folks wanted restrictions and deaths go away. But things like masks were too much of a burden. That opens up the road for populism where you promise solutions but have no realistic paths to that. An ethical government should be transparent, but a transparent government would exhibit flaws that will be punished by the electorate. Rather hide and deflect and to stay in power. The system disincentivizes real solutions as techbro/populist approaches to solutions which promise convenient (if unrealistic) solutions are simply more attractive. Then add a media landscape that elevate those voices over critical (if depressing) ones and you have good mixture where you cannot get good solutions, and those who try will get blamed. Don't get me wrong, there are real issues that needs to be addressed, but there is a general and understandable unwillingness to make sacrifices. Instead, it is politically prudent to find someone to blame. And this approach has been supercharged in the last decade or so. Thinking a bit more about the techbro aspect- I feel increasingly folks have been promised and believe in simple, disruptive solutions. "Things are not working out, so we'll just break things but magically all will be better, just trust us." As we have seen, the magic promises that were made by the tech industry actually never panned out and virtually all promises of being ethical, transparent or being not-for-profit ultimately fell along the wayside. Rather than elevating the common folk, they became the product.

You are right, my apologies. I should have said that they were ideological aligned (i..e in the aspects of neoliberal economics) and not suggested that Reaganomics was to blame. My thinking fell prey to an (unfounded) assumption of US ideological dominance. This is especially bad due to European origins of the underpinning schools of thoughts.

I think this particular view of small government and reducing social systems as part of trickle down economic has entered the arena in quite a few European countries (and Canada). Thatcher was a poster child of basically similar ideas regarding free markets coupled with reduced government spending, for example. However, as already mentioned, this is not an issue of the Western world alone. There are different ways to measure wealth inequality, but using e.g. the Gini index, countries with the highest wealth inequality are found in Africa and South America, whereas the lowest include European countries such as the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Iceland. Also, the trends are not universally trending towards disparity. Looking at trends, it might seem that crises (including the pandemic) have resulted in upwards jump in inequality (suggesting that the economic system allows small groups to benefit greatly from crises). But we do not see that trend in Western Europe (quite the opposite). You can see below the Gini index (0=total equality; 1=total inequality) from US, China, Russia, Canada and some Western European countries (from ourworldindata.org). The details are more complicated, of course, but I am not sure whether a simple narrative is sufficient to explain these differences. And certainly it does not point to a singular issue exclusively to the West.

Many organisms reproduce asexually (basically all prokaryotes, a range of animals, plants and fungi). Then there is sexual reproduction among hermaphrodites, and I feel I forgot another method for some reasons. The development of sexual reproduction is a bit perplexing from a genetics perspective as instead of inheriting all your genes to the next generation, you now only provide half. This is referred to as the two-fold cost of sex.